The First Day ...
- Angel Island
Angel Island State Park, the largest natural island in
the San Francisco Bay, offers some of the best views of the surrounding Bay
Area. With great hiking trails and many other recreational opportunities
readily available, Angel Island is truly a hidden gem in the midst of the
urban Bay Area. We drove to Tiburon (north of San Francisco Bay) to
catch 1PM ferry to Angel Island. Having been living in the Bay
Area for 30+ years, it is our first time to visit Angel Island!
We got our rental bikes right at the ferry terminal at
Angel Island. The paved perimeter road is the 5-mile bike trail circling
the island. Most part of the trail is flat or gentle slope (we only struggled
for a couple of uphill that we had to walk our bikes...). It provides
expansive breathtaking 360 degree views of the bay area–San Francisco skyline,
Golden Gate Bridge, Bay Bridge, etc. Since we had to return the bikes by
3PM (the last ferry was at 3:20PM), we could not spend too much time to explore
many of those historical buildings around the island.
The Second Day ...
- Muir Woods National Monument
On January 9, 1908, President Theodore Roosevelt declared the land
a national monument, the first to be created from land donated by a private
individual, William and Elizabeth Kent. The original suggested name of
the monument was the Kent Monument but Kent insisted the monument be named
after naturalist John Muir. It protects 554 acres (224 ha), of which
240 acres (97 ha) are old growth coast redwood (Sequoia sempervirens)
forests, one of a few such stands remaining in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Coast redwoods are the tallest living things on Earth (the tallest reaches
379 feet in Redwood National Park
in the northern California). In Muir Woods, the tallest is over 258
feet (about the height of a 23-story building). Today, over 1 million
people visit this rare uncut redwood forest each year. We arrived at
the park at ~8AM (the first parking time slot) so we could enjoy the quiet
forest along the trail (and I could take time to photography the tall trees
and forests) before the crowds showed up.
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